On the Internet, weblogs (i.e., “blogs”) are hosted on web sites and contain content such as articles of information, usually in a non-commercial aspect, that are posted by authors. For example, blogs may contain a commentary or a description written by an author on a particular topic or matter that may include text, images and video. Collectively, a community of weblogs may be called a “blogosphere.” A significant feature of blogs includes the ability for users to respond to blog posts by submitting user feedback on a web site. User feedback is typically in the form of submitted comments from users that are then included on the intended web page or blog post.
In an autonomous network environment such as the Internet, identifying and ranking notable or important content on web sites and blogs may be accomplished using various web search and ranking algorithms. As blogs have proliferated on the Internet, the tasks of navigating, identifying and organizing blog content have also been implemented using available web search and ranking techniques. For example, an existing technique to identify and rank content on a web site relies on tracking a number of instances that the web content is linked to by other web pages. By tallying the number of web pages that link to the web content, the ranking of the web content can be determined in comparison with other web content.
However, in existing techniques, user feedback (i.e., in the form of comment data) posted on a web site or blog is not considered in ranking the web content. Therefore, an analysis of the comment data is not performed in ranking web pages.